Friday, June 24, 2016

Britain just
voted to leave the European Union – Brexit passed 52-48. This is not an issue that I have studied so I
don’t really have an informed opinion, but I do want to mark what I think is
probably a pretty important event with at least some random thoughts and
wonderings.

It appears
that Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales now are all talking about breaking from
Britain because they don’t want to leave the European Union. Did Britain just vote to become England?

Leaving the
European Union might also unravel the European Union. It is fine to have a common market, but a
common currency, and bureaucratic control from Brussels without a common,
united government seems to have stopped working around September 15, 2008 when
Lehman Brothers in the United States declared bankruptcy and the entire world
economy nearly collapsed, hitting the European Union particularly hard.

This is a
big step in the general unravelling of the world, or at least the unravelling
of many of the existing structures of the world. I never really understood the European Union –
how did such completely different peoples decide that they had a common
identity? After centuries of disastrous
wars? In order to prevent future
disastrous wars, of course, was the objective, but the old WWII folks are
mostly dead now, and newer generations might have to learn those old terrible
lessons all over again? I certainly hope
not.

On the
surface it looks like the biggest cause of the Brexit is saying NO to forced
immigration policies onto England by Brussels.
I think there are a number of right wing movements in the rest of Europe
pushing back very hard on the acceptance of immigrants from the exploding
Middle East. (thank you Osama bin Laden
for leading these attacks, and thank you George W Bush for taking bin Laden’s
bait and invading Iraq (that’s a bit of sarcasm just in case I was confusing)).

It’s all
reactionary. I think it starts with WWI,
goes to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, goes to Colonialism and Imperialism
of the Middle East, goes to supporting despotic Middle Eastern regimes by the West
(just send us the oil and stop Communism), goes to terrorism to drive out the “infidels”, goes to
chaotic realignments in the Middle East, goes to massive immigration into the
West out of the Middle Eastern slaughters, goes to xenophobic and nationalistic
reaction against the immigrants out of fear of terrorism and out of fear of
dilution of existing nationalistic boundaries and identities, goes to Brexit…

Sunday, June 12, 2016

ISIS has claimed responsibility for the slaughter of innocents in Orlando last night where 50 were killed and another 52 were injured in a gay night club. This is an unthinkable level of depravity and carnage. How is it possible for anybody to buy a weapon that can mow down over 100 people? As far as I'm concerned it needs to be illegal to sell any weapon capable of firing more than 10 shots. Beyond that, how is it possible that someone who is on an FBI terrorist watch list to buy an assault weapon? Must the weapons lobby, the NRA, insist on selling anything to anyone just as long as it gets its money?My heart goes out to the killed and wounded and all those who love them or loved them. This is just too much pain to have to live with.Apparently, the fascist wing of Islam, the Islamofascists, think that they are justified by their holy texts to kill gay people. What a stupid idea. It's just bigotry and fear of homosexuality dressed up in religious robes. I am convinced that those who are violently against gays are afraid that they actually have gay tendencies and are violently opposed to gay urges in themselves. They manifest that fear by acting out dogmatically and violently against gays. They are manifesting their own fears, and quite frankly revealing their own attractions to same sex people which is something they cannot come to terms with in themselves.I believe that ISIS wants to have a say in this year's presidential election. They have been trying to bait the U.S. into a massive ground war in the Middle East because they believe it is written in their holy scripts that the Armageddon is coming and is necessary for the establishment of their caliphate where strict Islamic rule is the rule of the land. They see this as required by their God. So far, Obama has done a good job of not taking the bait and keeping the U.S. out of the religious civil wars in the Middle East (at least as much as possible)I have expected atrocious attacks during this election cycle because I believe they want our presidential candidates to take the bait and promise to send massive troops to the Middle East. It's bait. It's a trap. We should treat this as terrorism, not as an existential war. So far, Obama is doing that. Will Trump? How about Hillary? I think Trump will see this as his ticket to the White House because the only people he pays any attention to are the Right Wing radicals on the radio and Fox News. And I presume that there will not be any call for thoughtful response in those quarters.

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Two of the biggest political problems, in my opinion, are gerrymandering and the current
primary election system.

Gerrymandering
is where the party in power in a state draws the lines of voting
districts. They do this in a way that will most benefit their own party for elections over the next ten years. As has been said by others, it changes the
whole idea of democracy. Rather than
having the voters choose their politicians, the politicians choose their
voters. And we end up with an
unrepresentative democracy. In 2014
Republican House members in total received 51.2% of all the votes cast nationwide, yet they got 56.8% of the House seats on D.C. That is not what the Founders had in mind.

Solution?
Eliminate gerrymandering by having independent, non-partisan committees draw
voting lines in each state, legislated by Federal law. Or better yet, have a mathematical formula
based on geography and population applied to each state so there is no human
bias possible in the drawing of the voting districts. Probably a complicated
math problem but should be solvable.

The second
big problem is what we are seeing in these 2016 elections – the primary
voting system being used by both parties to choose a nominee for
president.

The biggest
distortion is that the voters who turn out in primary elections are more
politically committed, and more ideologically extreme than the general voting
public. So, we get extremists nominated who
do better in primaries than they would in a nationwide general election.

Also, there is a set order, established by tradition,
that puts some states at the beginning of the cycle and others at the end. So, Iowa farmers have an outsized influence
on who survives the primary gauntlet.
And South Carolina too, with it’s strange effect of having lots of
African Americans voting in the Dem primary, and white not so unbiased whites
voting in the Rep primary. And then
California ends up at the tail end despite being the largest state by far.

Primary
elections were not handed down from the Founders of America. They have only been around for about fifty
years, and the flaws are becoming more and more apparent. What to replace them with? There was something to be said about the old
smoke filled room party leaders that chose who would represent their
party. They were a vetting system. They were natural suppressors of extremist
nut jobs. They were a force for
stability. Turning the selection over to
the voters opens up the parties to change, and that is good, but it also opens
the doors to extremists and populists, and in this year of Trump it opens up
the Republican Party to a populist demagogue who threatens to be an
authoritarian despot. Not good.

My
suggestion would be to keep the primary system, but moderate its effect in two
ways.

First, have
the order of primary states be on a rotation basis based upon random
distribution – with a mix of large population states and small population
states having their primaries every two or three weeks in groups of about five
or ten until the cycle is complete.

Second, have
the total number of delegates selected by the primary voters be only half of
the delegates who go to the conventions, where the real election to nominate
each party’s candidate happens. The
other half would be professional elected politicians, men and women who have
already succeeded in winning their positions at the voting booth. These folks would be the governors, attorney
generals, the state legislators, the city mayors, etc. The math would have to be worked out and
guidelines set as to their qualifications to attend the conventions, but that
should be doable.

That way, a
populist or ideological extremist would have substantial mitigating forces of
professional politicians that would either support or not support him or
her. And at the same time, corrupt or intemperate
or unethical candidates would have those who knew them behind the scenes there
to stop them as well. Also, a
traditional candidate would have these same elected politicians who might be
part of a movement or populist sentiment there to push back against them.

So I think
we need some balance in our electoral system.
End the corrupt, undemocratic gerrymandering. And balance the popular vote which is now
overly influenced by extremist ideologically committed voters and those
vulnerable to populist frenzies with professional already elected politicians
in each state. Checks and balances. We need them, I believe. A Trump nomination is wake up call for both
parties and for the nation.

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About Me

I am a boomer who has been both a left winger and a right winger and am seeking to add some soothing energy to the inflamed polarizations of today's rhetoric. However, in the age of extremist Republicanism I see the best way to soothe the waters is to oppose the inflammations from the Right, and the Left as needed.